Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox!

Can you believe that five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0? Since then, the company says that 330 million users choose Firefox — Mozilla claims that it’s one-fourth of the Internet population using their browser. I can’t verify that, but I can validate that just over 40% of our visitors see us through a version of Firefox at last check. Clearly, the vast array of browser extensions — a big differentiator — have much to do with Firefox’s popularity. Maybe we should have seen the rise of the app store as we watched browser extensions add value to Mozilla’s platform. ;)

Probably the most memorable bit I have of Firefox is the large New York Times advertisement in December of 2004. But through the years, Firefox has provided plenty of other memories and new features. Here’s a stroll down memory lane with some of them:

Firefox 3.0 — Smart location bar, improved download manager, increased performance. This version also set a world record for most downloads in a day with 8,002,530 downloads

Related to Firefox’s birthday is a new official emblem for mobile versions of Firefox. “Pocketfox” was chosen to represent Fennec through a contest held by Mozilla. I like the image — Firefox in your pocket is exactly what mobile users are looking for.

Firefox is just a cheap version of Opera. Opera is and has always been the best browser. I tried firefox when it first came out and it was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SLOWWWWW. Installed 2 add-ons (to enable some options “default options” in many browsers) and it got slower. Firefox is just not reliable.